All Questions

I am part of a small team at my university researching costs, time, and resources associated with early spacecraft/satellite development. The goal is to generate numerical models associated with very ...

I can't seem to find an answer on this. I thought that when oxygen and hydrogen get injected they collide and break bonds etc. to form water vapour which because of the pressure in the combustion ...

Do current plans for people going to Mars by SpaceX depend only on consumables loaded from Earth or do they also include obtaining some materials from Mars fairly soon after arrival? Does the plan ...

Is it possible that mining on asteroids could bring life back to Earth such as bacteria?

Today I was puzzled when my son was holding a school globe asking me to show with my finger a trajectory of a (nuclear) ballistic missile flying from US to China and Russia and vice versa (from Russia ...

I'm working with Python and STK integration. I need to build scenarios and save them, the problem is that I cannot find any saving example on AGI's documentation. Here is a starting point: ...

Could the principal of hypergolic fuels be applied to hybrid rockets? And if so, are there any known hypergolic solid/liquid combinations?

This ten-year-old article on a squeezesuit concept estimates that it is ten years from completion. Ten years have passed, and this article is still the #1 hit on Google, with a couple of other ...

It's known that there's a lot of perchlorate contained in Mars' surface soil. But could we take the toxic part out and make it become plantable? How to do it?

To the best of my knowledge, a microphone has never been sent to Mars. Why is that? We take pictures of Mars, why not sound recordings ?

Have you ever heard of the old movie Salvage? The TV movie, “Salvage,” aired on January 20, 1979. The film begins with Harry successfully bidding for a vintage bi-plane and then reselling it in pieces ...

NASA says that it can build a magnetic dipole shield at the Mars L1 Lagrange Point, but how do they support the electricity?

When multiple thrusters are connected to one pressurized propellant tank and multiple thrusters are fired simultaneously, this will cause a pressure drop in the supplying pipes and as such a drop in ...

If you support the Big Bang,and if you agree that most explosions eject mass in all directions,and that the universe is expanding (some say even speeding up), then why is there no massive, mostly ...

Had a space shuttle suffered a main-engine failure very early on during ascent, or had a time-critical emergency (for instance, a crewmember unexpectedly having a stroke) occurred before negative ...

From the Apollo 12 flight journal: 087:31:29 Conrad (onboard): [Laughter] Yes. Let's take the LM down and land on the back side. Wouldn't that shake them up? [Laughter]. 087:31:36 Bean (...

Here, 'optical zoom' means an optical system that changes magnification (angle subtended per pixel). It would not mean for example switching from one camera to another on Hubble, or changing to ...

How big are photos taken in space? (Megapixels) Furthermore, are there any standards in regards to photo size, quality, etc or do most entities building satellites for exploration or scientific data ...

I used the thrust to weight ratio of 2.12 to determine the thrust my spacecraft needs for a lunar liftoff, Apollo Lunar Ascent Stage Thrust to Weight Ratio. Is this a proper way of determining and ...

If a certain celestial body has a great enough mass, it has the ability to bend and in some cases twist time. For example black holes have the ability to bend time around them. Time near black holes ...

After two major players aiming at asteroid mining (not just the Moon) were bought up and repurposed, who still does follow this topic as primary business model? Deep Space Industries was bought by ...

How is it that NASA receives broadcasts from 300 million miles away but Sprint needs to install transmitters every 500ft for 5G wireless?

The Martian atmosphere is thinner and the magnetic field isn't present. I wonder how many asteroids fall and if at least the small ones can burn in the atmosphere before reaching the soil. Thanks in ...

Unlike most civilian solid-fuel rockets, which use ammonium perchlorate/aluminium fuels with a rubber binder (known in the industry as ammonium perchlorate composite propellant, or APCP for short), ...

In this comment I just wrote: "...but at all other times it is just doing math to calculate its trajectory." The math needed a stable clock Timing accuracy of the Apollo Guidance Computer? (also 2, ...

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of ...

I recently discovered the pictures from DSCOVR taken at the Lunar Transit in 2016. The earth appears very massive behind the moon, which is a little unintuitive if you consider how small it is when ...

In the movie, First Man (2018), Neil Armstrong is getting into Gemini 8 space craft. He overhears capcom voice: CARNARVON CAPCOM: Guaymas, read you loud and clear. We have S band track. We have ...

As I understand it, cosmic radiation is one of the biggest dangers/problems to space exploration. Some cursory research seems to suggest that it wouldn't take very strong magnetic fields to deflect ...

There is movie called, " First Man (2018), which is about Apollo 11 mission. CAPCOM-APOLLO 11 speaks to Apollo 11 crew: CAPCOM-APOLLO 11: Apollo 11, now entering lunar orbit. Your roll should ...

There are a couple of existing questions about riding bicycles off of Earth. Designing a bicycle for Mars? Can you ride a bicycle on Deimos? Bicycles are lightweight and proved a reliable method ...

I understand there is a stabilizing force due to gravity gradient. What I'm unsure about is the stabilization part. How does it work? It looks like to me that this tidal force would just make the ...

I would think that this would be the case. In any one transmission there will be a systematic error due to the fundamentals of the transmitter / receiver. Is there also a transient or stochastic error ...

Limiting the concept of "lunar new year" to "Chinese New Year" (since there are many lunar and lunisolar calendars, the latter of which the traditional Chinese one is a widely used example), is this ...

Why do the experts say one thing about the behavior and presence of dust on the moon pertaining to the down firing rocket of the lunar lander, and the absence of debris clouds, or ground disturbance......

@PearsonArtPhoto's answer links to the page Apollo 8, 21 – 28 December 1968 by Hamish Lindsay at honeysucklecreek.net. The page describes a problem with one of the dish antennas that needed to be ...

@PearsonArtPhoto's answer links to the page Apollo 8, 21 – 28 December 1968 by Hamish Lindsay at honeysucklecreek.net. It shows a clipping from The Canberra Times front page, "With thanks to Mike ...

I'm writing a program to compute the heliocentric ecliptic position of planets and asteroids. I want to output rectangular coordinates oriented according to the ecliptic: positive X in the direction ...

@PearsonArtPhoto's answer links to the page Apollo 8, 21 – 28 December 1968 by Hamish Lindsay at honeysucklecreek.net from where I have quoted below. Question: What exactly turned on the light ...

I must be missing something - escape velocity is about 25,000mph. The distance to the moon about 240,000 miles. That computes to about a 9 hour flight. Why did it take 3 days for Apollo missions to ...

In this video of the Russian Burevestnik rocket launch (uses nuclear power) 1) What is that light spot moving backwards (contrary to the rocket trajectory, backwards towards the launch fixtures): Is ...

@ahiijny added a direct link to the Sol 5110-5114 MER B Downlink Report. These are the final days that signals were received from Opportunity. The message "Tau Value is NOT a Typographical Error" ...

Can Mars top soil be transformed to be arable, and how to do it? It may be planted in the isolated space.

We know that in real viscous flow, boundary layer exists around the airfoil and there will be a separation point which flow starts to separate from the back of the airfoil( velocity gradient equal ...

The conditions on Venus's surface are extremely harsh. I'm trying to conceptualize what it would be like to walk on the surface through supercritical carbon dioxide. Obviously we must neglect the high ...

I was wondering how realistic it is to build an artificial magnetic field around Mars using electromagnetism. So my question is; what kind of current would be needed in a loop around Mars' equator to ...

Everybody seems to be abuzz with the idea that Opportunity's last transmission was "My battery is low and it's getting dark." Of course, that would be a human interpretation of some sort of ...

I am trying to program the Gim-Alfriend state transition matrix. You can read all about it here. The GA STM is a complex analytical model that maps relative motion of a deputy satellite in a ...

Most of all the articles about Mars terraforming focuses on warming the atmosphere. 2nd most popular topic as far as I know is the magnetic field that Mars lacks. Some other sources speak about toxic ...

Perhaps this seems trivial, since it may not directly affect our planet, but if we ever colonize the Moon and mine its resources, the trace of human devastation will change sooner or later the surface ...